


but tell it slant

by arbitrarily



Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Infidelity, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21980557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Jo does not marry. Laurie did.
Relationships: Theodore Laurence/Josephine March
Comments: 55
Kudos: 786





	but tell it slant

**Author's Note:**

> I saw the new movie adaptation a couple days ago, and since my life has never known peace/snakes started manifesting in my house physically, and apparently I felt the need to write all of _this_. Shoutout to Greta Gerwig for breaking my heart all over again, and also to Angel Olsen, specifically for the song ["Chance,"](https://youtu.be/zY4x1MDWWi8) which I listened to for the entirety of writing this (when I wasn't listening to Fleetwood Mac's ["Silver Springs"](https://youtu.be/kVE4aOUX2iM)), and general apologies to Amy March for all the infidelity, emotional or otherwise.

"There should always be at least one old maid in a family, and I’ve made up my mind that it’s going to be me."  
LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa May Alcott

I follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you.   
"SILVER SPRINGS," Fleetwood Mac

She did not accept his proposal. She refused two men, and if there was to be a third, Jo knew she would refuse him, too.

To the first, she pleaded, “No, Teddy—please, don’t,” and he only turned beggar in reply. To the second, she took Friedrich’s hands in her own and she whispered a quiet apology she mostly meant. She truly did not have any wish to hurt him, same as she truly did not wish to have to marry him. It was that clause, “to have to,” that obliging imperative, that she had never been able to explain to another. It was the fuel for her resistance. She would be made to do nothing. She would never marry.

“Oh, Jo,” Meg said, after she returned home empty-handed and alone. “How I hate to imagine a future for you without love.”

Jo lifted her head, balanced on her hand, her elbow bent against the edge of Meg’s table. “You say that as if love and marriage are the same. As if one can only exist by virtue of the other's presence. I aim to tell you that you are very much so incorrect.”

“I fear New York has made you even more improper than you were when you left.”

“The city is hardly responsible for my own nature. I am much as when I left. More certain, perhaps.”

Meg lowered the laundry she had folded into her lap. “You’ll get lonely,” she warned. 

“Dear sister, fret not." Jo grinned, closed-mouthed and tight. "I already am.”

Every love story was a story of timing.

It was a long walk from the attic to her family gathered in the parlor. She let Laurie go down to them first. It was very easy to be very angry at him. After he left her, she sat alone, hunched over and drawn up and she willed herself not to cry. 

In the parlor, Amy came to her first. Her face was a rictus mask of nerves, yet her joy still apparent underneath. “You don’t mind terribly, do you, Jo? I fretted and I fretted the entire journey home.”

Jo knew exactly what she wanted to do, none of it pretty. She could see Marmee, standing behind Amy. She thought briefly of Beth. She curved her mouth upward into a soft smile. “And for no need,” she heard herself say. “I cannot imagine myself more pleased for two people other than you.” She widened her smile. Jo’s mouth was fanged, all teeth. 

Amy squealed. She lunged forward and embraced Jo tightly. She smelled of lavender water, expensive and clean. Over Amy’s shoulder, she met Marmee’s eye. She did not blink.

“Of course she was worried how I might take it. How did she expect I’d react? My Teddy, she married my Teddy. No wonder she’s never succeeded as an artist, she hasn’t an original thought or desire in her entire body let alone her head. First, Europe, and now him.”

“I suspect it isn’t fair for one woman to lay claim to an entire continent and a man’s heart she has already rejected,” Marmee said, slowly and with great patience. Jo snorted. Marmee waited quietly for what felt like a very long time as Jo paced furiously across the attic. 

“Do you feel better now?” she asked when Jo finally stilled.

“Hardly. I feel positively rotten.”

Jo never had any desire to be a mystery to herself. That, she knew, was how a heroine in a story got into trouble. She got lost if she let herself become unknown, specifically to herself. The heart should be treated the same as anything else, well-tended and inventoried. Imagine her surprise then, that in his absence and following her rejection, the discovery—perhaps rooted in loneliness and maybe worse in regret—that when she thought of him, she was met by her own thoughts, now as tangled and impenetrable as a briar bush. Her feelings, even more than her thoughts, had deepened into something complex and unknowable, unbearable to herself. 

So she did what she always did. She sat down, she picked up her pen. She wrote him a letter.

Imagine her surprise then, to find him married to her sister. The letter remained, forgotten, waiting, in the postbox.

Laurie lingered behind her in the kitchen at Orchard House. In the month since their arrival, he and Amy came over often for meals with the family. It was in this way, Amy liked to say, as if they had never left. 

“I heard you had yourself a German professor.”

Jo wielded the knife with little care as she sliced through an onion. “Had, maybe,” she said, distracted by the biting sting behind her eyes, the stench of the cut onion.

She felt Laurie lean in closer. It was as if being wrapped in another’s shadow. He dropped his voice, low and secretive. “Did you poison him?”

Jo lifted her head on a surprised laugh. She turned it to look at him. He was far closer than she thought. Close enough that she could see the faint freckles distributed over his nose and the red shot through his eyes. “No.” She turned back to the dissected onion. “He went to California.”

“Whatever for?”

“A job,” she said, very careful now. “And because I refused him.”

Laurie said nothing. Somewhere between Concord and Paris, some time after Amy, Laurie had discovered his patience. Jo never found hers. Instead, she found that Laurie was different, even if so much about him remained very much so the same. The Laurie who came back to them, who returned as a husband, was far more still, more placid, than the boy who left. There was an attentiveness, a watchfulness to him now, without the impulsive zip and spark that very much so characterized him. That charmed her.

It was a peculiar emotion, Jo now knew, to miss the person standing right before you.

“Why did you refuse him?” he asked.

Jo set the knife down and wiped her hands on her apron. She turned her entire body now to face him. “I told you. I do not believe I’ll ever marry. My opinion remains unaltered.”

Laurie took one step forward. He slid his hands into his pockets and he was the boy she knew as well as she once knew her own sisters. “My condolences to the poor fellow.” His mouth quirked up. “My comrade-in-arms.” He stood over Jo and ducked his head, as if to kiss her cheek. “I know his pain too well.”

There was always a murder. A marriage, arranged then scuttled. A baby, born in secret or scandal. A heart—broken. A hand that grabbed at a full skirt; a hand, masculine and wide, that sought the hem and lifted. Jo’s imagination stuttered along with her impatient breath as she wrote. As her pen smeared across the page. She sent her stories to any paper that would have her, and occasionally she received in return confirmation of her publication as well as modest payment. 

“‘ _She had long waited for him in cresting agony, but that did little to curb the heated quickening of her pulse at his arrival.’”_

Jo froze, the sifter of powdered sugar still held aloft over the spice cake. She had felt him at her back before she heard him. The holidays had come to Orchard House yet again. Meg and John were to be married that upcoming spring, near to the time when Laurie would graduate Harvard. She looked at him over her shoulder in stunted shock. “How?” It was the only question worth asking.

“You thought I wouldn’t be able to recognize my dearest friend, even when masquerading under the name of J. Pickwick to tell her lurid tales?” She felt his legs brush against the back of her skirt. He pitched his voice that much softer. “Why don’t I ever get to see this creative side of Jo March?”

“She’s mercenary more than she is creative,” she snapped. Jo’s cheeks were flushed; she hated talk like this. It was as if a target was placed upon her and there was nowhere for her to hide. It was as if she could only understand passion when it was written on the page, under a name not her own, and experienced by those invented others than herself. Fiction, then, in every mode. She had no desire to be confronted by it, least of all by him.

“‘ _How her breast heaved—_ ’”

“Teddy, don’t,” she hissed. She glanced around the kitchen as he laughed, delighted with himself, and most likely her reaction to him. “Not here.”

“Funny, I believe that’s what she said, too,” he whispered too close to the length of her neck. Too close, as his fingers traced down the line of her skirt.

“So this is where you have been keeping yourself.”

Jo was crouched down on protesting knees. She continued to cross out the line on the page before her. “Mm-hmm,” she said. 

Laurie looked around the attic, at all the pages Jo had neatly set out. “What is all this?”

Jo finally looked up at him. “I’m working on a novel.”

She caught only the start of it, as her attention was diverted back to the writing before her, but a gentle smile began to break over his lips. “About what?”

“Oh, life, I suppose. Life in all its minute and domestic details. It’s,” and she waved her hand, the pen still held between her fingertips. Ink dripped down to settle in the webbing between her fingers. “Intimate.”

“Intimate,” he repeated. He reached for the page nearest him. Jo leaned over the pages on the floor, managing to disrupt none of them, and slapped at his hand.

“Personal.”

Laurie raised his eyebrows. “This is personal? I cannot read it?”

“I mean, the story is personal. Of course you can read it—when it’s finished.”

He leaped over the pages on the floor, agile and performative. He landed near her desk. “Where’s a person meant to sit up here?”

Jo shrugged, her body bent forward again over her work. “Wherever one can find the room.”

Laurie perched on the end of her desk, his long skinny legs spread out, his heels dangerously close to Chapter Three of the novel. She cut her eyes from him and back to her increasingly tired and messy handwriting. Even as a man, he had yet to settle into one. He was still incredibly boyish, but maybe he would always be to her. Perhaps that was the penance paid for knowing someone through youth. For loving them then. 

She shook out her hand and resumed her writing. Quietly, patiently, he watched.

“Jo, I want you to know that I have tried.”

Laurie said it only when he had her attention, the both of them seated together on either end of the sofa. Proximity to Laurie was not something she often entertained since his return, not anywhere but here in the attic. But he sought her out, as if even now distance was worse than its alternative. He came up to the attic so regularly that he no longer served as interruption. She worked through his occupation of her space. 

His words prickled at her. “I do not know what you mean,” she said as she set down her revisions. She massaged the fingers of her right hand then moved on to the left. 

“You do. You’re never dumb.” She looked down at her hands, loosely clasped in her lap. The side of her left hand was smeared with ink. “Would you please look at me.”

She did. She wished she had not. His expression was tortured even though he had said so little already. She should not let him say more; she wanted him to.

“I wish to say something that I know shall have me branded a liar,” he said. "I know that I said, upon our return, we would never visit the subject again, but.” Dread began to rise in her, same as something far worse, more dangerous, became unstuck deep within her.

The drumbeat of her heart was one of warning. “Teddy, you don’t have to say anything.”

“Except that I do. I thought it would get better.” He said it as if she was but a summer cold to be cured of. His mouth twisted as her own lifted in the start of a nervous laugh. “How I had hoped I would tire of you.”

Jo’s face stilled. She sat up straighter. Laurie was so rarely deliberately cruel to her she never quite knew how to take it.

“Yes, well, have you yet?” 

“I’m miserable. Jo, you make me miserable.” He sounded like he very much so meant it. 

She did laugh this time, but the sound was humorless. 

“It isn’t funny.”

Jo took to her feet and took a wide step away from him. “No,” she said. “It’s not. Which is why I think you and Amy should go. Travel. There’s a far greater world than Concord. I am certain your grandfather has work for you in London. Perhaps you can manage to find less misery there, or at the very least, less of me.”

Laurie frowned as he leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Are you chasing me away?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mean that.” He leaned back, away from her. He said it with absolute certainty. His eyes were very clear, his face near triumphant, and with an icy drop inside her, she knew—he had read her letter. She left the letter in the postbox and he had found it. Her cheeks flushed hot and she turned away from him, self-preservation as strong as the humiliation she felt. 

“Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I mean it now.”

She heard Laurie stand up. He was before her in a single step. His hand was on her shoulder, turning her to face him. He did not let go. “I think you’re as miserable as I am,” he said.

Jo shook her head. “I’m not. I’m really not.”

He cupped her face in his hands then, and when she breathed in, deep, her chest felt lighter. As if a gate had been unlatched and she had been afforded more room to roam. To breathe. She clutched at his forearm, unsure if she meant to pull his hands away or hold him steady in place. 

“My Jo,” he whispered.

If she could see clearly, if she could see beyond his face, she would see the bridge they were about to cross. It was a bridge from which there was no return. There were a great many points in a person’s life that served as such an irretrievable landmark. She closed her eyes and she could feel his breath on her face. 

Panic was the first thing she felt when he pressed his lips to hers. Wild, ungovernable. Fearsome. As if a part of herself existed inside of her that prior to this very moment she had not met before. A stranger dwelled within her and now they stirred. His breath tasted of claret, of warmth. She did not move her own mouth beneath his, even as he tried to coax her open with his own. 

He kissed her softly, as if all the ways they had attempted to communicate throughout their lives, this was the easiest, the most direct. The most honest. She could say she tried as well, but here she did not. Not for long. She conceded, more to herself than to him. She kissed him back. It only seemed right, to know what this felt like. 

He kissed her back more reverently, and he clutched her to him, his grip ironclad around her waist. She let herself fall into him, into his affection, and attempted to give her own in kind. Her ink-stained hands were stark against the pale skin of his face, quickly reddening under her attention.

It was odd now, to know that they had gone an entire lifetime without ever doing this to each other. They had done everything. Some nights, when she could not sleep, she made a list borne specifically out of spite of all the things that Amy had most like done with and to Laurie that Jo would never do. She was not sure what she meant to do with such information, but it felt like a weapon. Like ammunition. It did not give her strength, but rather fury. She felt herself dig into that reservoir now, with his mouth so hot and claiming against her own, as if cupping it in her hands and bringing it up to drink. Her front teeth snagged against his lip, and his body stuttered into hers. She made a noise like a gasp and he swallowed it, made it his. He was so known to her, so complete and realized, she could write him into creation if he did not stand before her, touching her, as he did now. But, even then, he was equal parts a stranger. The Laurie she knew never kissed her, never held her. This new man was grafted onto the boy she remembered and knew; it was not two hands that touched her now but four. 

With that in mind, with a distant and curdling thought of her sister, Jo tried. She pulled back from him, even as Laurie continued to cling to her. His mouth dragged from hers to her chin, her jaw. Her cheek and then her temple.

He pressed his forehead to hers, his breath ragged. Guilt found her quickly and she swallowed against it. 

“Jo,” he breathed. “Jo, you have to know. You must know.”

Jo closed her eyes against him. “Don’t. You’ve done enough.”

“I will love you forever.” He said it anyway. He said each word with such emphasis, such absolutism, as if her mere existence in his life was enough to make him a fanatic.

“Please. Don’t, Teddy. You don’t get to say that.”

He cupped her face in his hands again and this time she tried to wriggle out of his grasp. “You think if I do not give voice to it that makes it any less true?”

That was scarcely what she meant. Her temper rose. One could hardly present their love to another and then walk away. For that was what he would do, and they both knew it. He would go away from here, back to his wife, to her sister, and all she would be left with was—nothing. This gave her nothing. He gave her nothing. She batted his hands away. “You don’t get to do that.”

Laurie pulled back from her, visibly stung. “Do what?” He still had yet to catch his breath, but exasperation had slipped easily into his voice.

“Hold me hostage with your love. It does not work that way.”

His face slackened as if she had struck him. “That’s what you—that’s what you think of me? A thousand pardons, Jo. Your attempted captor will leave you in peace now. May you find freedom to be as cold and lonely as the rest of us know it to be.”

“Get out.” Jo’s voice was trapped as a choking snarl in her throat. What right did he have. What right. To think she did not know the bitter chill of loneliness, to dare call freedom the same. She slung her arm up over her face and wrapped her other arm around her middle and could not right herself. She turned her back from the stairs as he descended, the sound of him fading and then gone.

Later, Jo would sit down at her family’s table for supper. Uncomfortable and self-aware, certain that what she had done must have marked her, she would stay quiet. She would cast a wary eye across to Amy and just as quickly look away. She would ask herself, either at that table or later that night in bed, the house quiet and dark, if she had done the same thing to Amy that Amy had done to her so long ago. Had she burnt something she loved in the spirit of dispossession? She would be able to feel Laurie’s eyes on her, as covetous as his hands, his mouth had been on her as well. She would not look at him. She could not give herself away so plain. She could not give herself.

“For you,” Marmee said one evening. She handed the small envelope to Jo. Jo recognized the handwriting immediately, the postage from London. The relief was as unexpected as the receipt of the letter. After her conversation and subsequent encounter with him, Laurie had surprised her by taking her advice. Laurie and Amy had gone to London on business. 

She barely looked at Marmee as she took the letter from her. On occasion, since their departure, Jo would feel a flash of such extreme shame, of disgust, it all but rooted her to the ground. She could not sleep when she let herself think about what Marmee would say if she knew. What Beth would think of her. She was terrible, both as a sister and a woman, and the most unforgivable of it all, as she laid alone in her childhood bed, was how she could not stop imagining, craving, that it might happen again while knowing full well that she would never let it. 

She did not open the envelope until late that night. She drew her knees in to her chest, the candle on her desk flickering in the faint draught that rushed through the attic. 

_Dearest Jo,_ the letter read.

She skimmed through the beginning of his letter, certain she would be returning to it many times in the coming days. She did not care about the social circles he and her sister ran in; she had no wish to read of Amy at all. 

_I purchased for myself a set of Dickens first editions as you never saw fit to return the copies I once lent you. Did you not once say to me a man must always have his Dickens with him? Per everything else said to me by you, I have taken the counsel to heart._

_I take you to heart. This is what I mean to write. It feels wrong to describe to you the mundane when so much turmoil lives inside of me. I pray you will forgive me for my less considerate actions while understanding they are bred from the most sincere place inside of me that burns, constantly. For you. Always for you._

With a sharp inhale, Jo’s hands trembled as she set the letter down on the desk. She was already thinking of places she could hide it, each word set down painfully revealing, not only of him but of her, too. She returned her gaze to the end of the letter, his penmanship rushed and fevered.

_Have me as you might. That will be the only thing I ask of you. For, as always, your gift for words said it best—_

_The worst fate is to live my life without you in it._

She did not reclaim the letter in time. 

Amidst Laurie’s and Amy’s arrival back in Concord, Jo had forgotten it entirely. 

When she did remember, she sat up stock still in the middle of the night. She raced out at first light to retrieve it from the postbox. She jabbed the key into the lock, the faded red ribbon the brightest thing in the wood that pale morning, and turned. She opened it, and—nothing. The wood was worn and warped and bare and there was nothing inside the box. 

Jo took a step back. Horror was quiet as it mounted within her, her cheeks blazing from the cold and the abject humiliation to come. She had written the letter in such a dreadful passion she could not even fully recall what and how much she committed to the page. 

She rested a hand against her stomach and took a deep, steadying breath. 

In the days to come, Laurie said nothing of the note to her. He was guarded with her and distant, as if he meant what he said when he told her the news in the attic, that this would be the last they spoke of his love for her. How embarrassing, how utterly miserable, to think of him with that letter. That he most like read it with pity. Poor Jo. Perhaps he even laughed at her.

Other times, she feared it was one of her sisters who took it instead. She doubted such a possibility very much. Logic spoke against it. Meg put behind childhood games long ago and Amy—she could not picture Amy trudging through the woods in her expensive silks, her petticoats catching up dried leaves and dirt, as she opened their mailbox. No; it had to be Laurie. It could only be Laurie.

“You were right,” Laurie said. “We would have killed each other.” It was late in the evening, the same day of the newlyweds’ return from abroad. Jo sat on the stairs, the rest of the house noisy and warm. She could hear Amy’s voice ring out as she regaled Marmee and Meg of Paris society. Laurie joined Jo, two stairs down from her. His face rested mostly in shadow, like a half-finished drawing. Like Amy’s work. 

Jo offered him a seasick smile. “How hopeful of you, to think matrimony to another will prevent our mutual slaughter.” Laurie’s smile slipped slightly, as if someone had dimmed the brightness of his face. “I was joking. That was a joke.”

“Ha,” he said. 

“Fear not, Teddy, we will be fine. I swear that I will love you only as a brother from here on out.”

Laurie’s brow furrowed with confusion. “I had thought that was the only way you ever had.”

When they were younger, Laurie would camp out on the old sofa in the attic while Jo wrote, the two of them utterly alone. One evening, he dozed as she worked. When she finished, she sat there, at her desk, and considered him. There was nothing intimidating in him as he slept, only gentleness. Not that she found him intimidating when awake, but to be male against her femininity conferred a gulf of knowledge and understanding. Jo resented anything that might make her seem foolish or anything less than clever. That she understood so little of men, of boys, made her wary on principle. 

Jo set her pen down. She rose and she stood over Laurie. His mouth was parted in a relaxed and shallow sleep. Jo took to her knees beside him. Without a further thought beyond curiosity, she traced the shape of his lips with her finger. He had a plush mouth, like a girl’s, pinked and supple beneath the pressure of her fingertips. He took a quick breath in. His mouth parted more and she touched him with more certainty, strength. His eyes were half-lidded now. He said, “Jo,” and she traced the shape of that, too.

Jo pressed the flat of her hand to his mouth, muffling the quiet noise of protest he made from behind it. He reached and he grabbed her arm, her waist, and he pulled her to him. The heel of her palm mashed hard against his mouth as she settled bodily against him. He was so warm. It was no different, she told herself, than all the times he brought her down hard against the ice or into the snow, barreled into her, his arms wrapped tight around her waist and her hips as he hauled her against him, rough-housed and dirtied their clothes with mud and grass. It was no different, except for how total and complete it was. 

Laurie lifted his own hand and covered hers over his mouth. A great light shone in his eyes as he looked up at her, so she leaned forward. She pressed her lips to the back of his hand. He was manageable like this, silent and pliant beside and against her. He kissed the palm of her hand in reply, as soft and aching as his gaze fixed on her.

He ruined it then. He tried to peel his hand off of hers. Her forehead knocked into his. “No,” she said sharply. He kissed the palm of her hand again, his mouth open and wet. He pushed his hips forward towards her, asking a question she refused to let him give voice to. She was very aware of each part of herself that touched him, just as aware of the parts that didn’t, that craved his warmth and weight, and a nervous tremor passed through her.

“No,” she said again. She got to her feet. He held fast to her hand as she pulled away before finally relenting. Before he let her go.

Laurie came up and found Jo at her writing desk. The first draft of her novel was compiled before her, nearly complete. It was to be the longest thing she has ever written. And while revisions awaited her in the near future, rewriting and reworking, for now she felt nothing more than uncomplicated pride. Her face glowed with it, her hair loose, the knot at the back of her head slackened, and strands slipped from it. 

“You know,” he said, “even still, this is how I picture you.”

Jo raised her head abruptly and looked to him over her shoulder. “What?” She was backlit only by candlelight, and he was looking at her very strangely. Despite that angular face of his, it had gone very soft as he considered her. 

He took a step forward and he gestured to the window behind her. “I used to watch you. I don’t know if you knew that. I was able to see you, through the glass. Lost in your own world, hard at work. I very badly wanted to join you.”

“Teddy,” she started, and just as quickly stopped.

“I’m meant to tell you supper is ready. You should come down now.”

Now that he was married, now that she had rejected him, he did not touch her. Not the way he used to, as natural as breathing. She missed it. She missed when he could touch her and it would not feel apocalyptic, destructive and world-ending. Terrifically dramatic in a way that for Jo had always been bound by the page and not her own heart. Her flesh.

When he touched her now, it was always private and deliberate.

They went to the shore. Once the summer months approached, after Amy and Laurie had come home. Amy insisted; she called it a tribute to Beth. Jo agreed, but she would not tell Amy this. Since Amy’s return as Mrs. Theodore Laurence while Jo gave every outward indication of forgiveness and acceptance and felicity, a far darker storm churned within her. In a way, it was very much so the same as when they were children, only they fought as adults now: passive and bloodless and without comment. 

Jo sat on the blanket in the sand as Amy went with Marmee, a slow stroll, the incoming tide reaching for the hem of their skirts. She watched their progress, her eyes squinted and narrowed. The afternoon sun was weak, caught behind a thick layer of clouds. She missed Beth with a pang.

Laurie collapsed down beside her suddenly. She bit down quickly on the smile that tried her mouth. So often when they were younger did Laurie remind Jo of a sack full of kittens, the way his body jerked and kicked, an abundance of energy questing for release. He was still now, beside her, his long legs splayed out onto the damp sand, his upper body leaned back and supported on his elbows. He was looking up at her strangely, not with pity or even sympathy, but rather as if they shared the same deep hurt. That her heart was his, so of course he would feel the same.

Jo swiped at her face quickly, her face damp with both tears and the sea air alike. She could taste the salt. 

“I know you must miss her terribly. I know I do,” Laurie said. 

“Yes,” Jo said. Her breath felt very tight and she thought she would love nothing more than to tear her dress from her body, yank at the laces of her corset and finally, finally, just _breathe_. “We don’t need to speak of it.”

Since Beth’s death, the only solace Jo had found, her only way to speak of and to her, was through her writing. The pages amassed significantly since and each story—stories of Beth and of Jo, and Meg and Amy, Marmee, Father, Aunt March even; Laurie—spilled from her as if she had struck a deep artery in herself and what she left on the page was her own life force. 

Now, she felt Laurie’s fingers on her own. He stroked down to where the ink had smeared and stayed, stained, his touch gentle. His hands were so unlike her own: pristine and soft and smooth. He covered her hand with his and held. She glanced down the shore but Amy and Marmee were very far away. She turned back to Laurie and found him waiting, looking up at her expectantly. When he had her attention, he lifted her hand to his mouth. He kissed each finger and then set their joined hands down on the blanket between them. 

“Oh, Teddy,” she said, very quietly. Quiet enough to be swept away by the wind off the water.

“I finished my book.”

“So I heard.”

Laurie followed her through Plumfield. The place was empty now that Aunt March had passed, the furniture was still draped with sheets. The place was Jo’s now. 

“And just in time,” he added. He ran a finger along the mantel and looked down at his dust-covered finger. He and Amy had only returned from London less than a fortnight ago. This was the first chance she had had alone with him. “You have much work ahead of you, if you plan to manage a house this size.”

“I plan to. I shall.”

“What will you do with it?”

Jo stepped wide into the parlor and spun. She remembered the long afternoons spent here, teetering between listless boredom and the exhilaration in the stolen minutes found in Aunt March’s far more stimulating volumes. 

“I’ll open a school,” she said, resolute.

“For girls?” Laurie asked. She scoffed.

“For boys,” she said. “For everyone.”

She stepped into the next room, into a shaft of sunlight. The bookshelves were emptied of Aunt March’s collection. She traced a finger over the vacant shelves, her back to Laurie. She heard him approaching her. 

“You received my letters from London?”

She had. And she had not responded. She feared putting anything more in writing, anything that could hurt someone. Amy, Laurie. Herself. “Yes,” she said. She turned around to face him.

“You know,” she continued, "I thought I might be able to save you from me, but it turns out I’m far too dreadful and selfish for such an act of noble bravery.” She said it wryly, her tone a form of protection from what she meant to say. To convey to him. It was foolish, she knew, to think that anything that transpired between the two of them could ever be taken back. When you loved someone, each act was irrevocable.

Laurie took her face in his hands. “You’re perfectly dreadful.” He did not kiss her. She wanted him to; she was grateful he didn’t. “You’re perfect.”

She wasn’t, but she did not correct him. She shook her head. “I’m so ashamed.”

“Jo.”

“No. You know this cannot go any further. You do not need me to tell you this.”

Laurie dropped his hands from her as if burnt. His posture began to curl in on himself, the set of his mouth grim and petulant and always wanting. She could see the boy in him like this, those afternoons he pouted from behind the window in Mr. Laurence’s study, Laurie desperate to join them—to join her—out of doors. 

“I’ll only love you more.” His voice made the words turn jagged under his care, glinting and sharp.

“You say that as if a threat.”

Laurie stood just outside the late afternoon light that poured in through the window. She thought of him as he stood on that hill, as he climbed it away from her. “Is it not?”

There could be a different version of the story than the one she writes. One that she creates, breathes life into, all through desire and stubborn hope. That story picks up where they left off—in the attic, his mouth on hers, earnest and real and entirely true. In that story, she does not stop him. She lets him take up her skirts and delve under her chemise, his fingers clumsy with the tie at the back of her bloomers. She learns what that ache between her legs can feel like when it’s him, when it’s Laurie, who addresses it. Every sound he makes is an animal’s and she answers him in kind. In another, in the story that continues at Plumfield, her fingers curl into the white dust cloth set over the chaise and he takes to his knees on the polished hardwood floor. 

Instead, Jo sat alone on that very draped chaise. The empty house had gone dark quicker than the evening and she sat very still after Laurie had gone. She did not light any candles, not yet. One could come to fear the acts a woman might commit out of her own loneliness. She wrote that line, in one of her stories, back before she had any true idea of her own potential.

“You still love him very much, don’t you.”

It was not a question Amy asked. The fire crackled and spat, the only noise in the room. Amy had been married a year, but she still spent most evenings visiting Orchard House. Marmee was in the kitchen, and Laurie was with Father. For once, Jo did not speak without forethought.

“You have always been very practical when it comes to matters of the heart,” she said, her attention still fixed on the banked flames. “You have learned to go cool where I still burn far too hot. I am reactive, perhaps, whereas you,” and Jo stopped. She did not know what she meant to say. She did not understand, still, how Amy had managed to move forward through this world and take only the ripest and sweetest fruit, to reap yet never sow. It felt too childish, too poor a reflection of herself, to declare any of it unfair, but sometimes, that was precisely what it felt to Jo. Unfair. Infuriating. Goodness often felt too far a reach for Jo, particularly when it came to this. To Amy. “All of that is to say, I think of love much as I do the weather—it is not for me to control, so I dare not even try.”

“You sound like him,” Amy finally said. 

Jo ignored her. “It blows through, and I live with it.”

“But,” Amy prompted.

Jo looked away from the fire and at her sister. For once, she was at a loss for words.

He was asleep on the sofa in the attic. It was a miserable autumn day of rain and mud and a brisk wind whipped through, promising the cold to come. 

Jo got to her feet. She shook out her right hand as she began to pace. Her fingers were cramped with both cold and overuse, the draft of her second novel perhaps near the midpoint. The candle had burnt down to nothing and night was quick descending. Amy would be expecting him home. Sometimes, she let herself wonder how much he told her. If she knew he spent his evenings here, serving as the worst muse Jo could invent for herself.

The floorboards creaked underfoot as she approached him. Laurie did not stir. He had a fine profile; she was certain Amy must have painted it dozens of times. She drew her finger down the slope of his nose and then she paused, right before the swell of his mouth. Instead, she combed her fingers through his hair, far neater now than it had ever been in youth. The strands were soft, exceedingly easy to yank, to pull, but Jo did neither. She gave him as much kindness as she was capable of, and even then it did not feel enough. She leaned in and she pressed her mouth to his ear. 

“I love you now,” she whispered. “I will love you forever.”

Jo opened the school that fall. She held a picnic at Plumfield to celebrate. She draped a tablecloth and began to set each place as she spied Laurie crossing the yard to her. He had a red leather bound book—her book—clutched in his hand. He stopped before her, the book held to his chest. He rapped his fingertips against it.

“You married him. You ended your book by marrying him.”

Jo grinned in surprise. In the months since that afternoon at Plumfield, they had come to an understanding. They would be friends, they could be friends, great friends, again, but only if they kept silent their mutual truths for each other. “You read it.”

“Do you have regrets, Jo March?” he mocked. “Is that what I am to understand by this ending?”

Jo laughed. “It was Mr. Dashwood who insisted. My book, but his press, his rules. There are only two commercially-viable outcomes for a heroine, and they are either marriage or death. I should say I chose the lesser of the two evils.”

He came nearer. “You didn’t write about me.”

Jo frowned as she resumed her table-setting. “That’s not true. I certainly wrote about you. I wrote too much about you.”

“You wrote about me as a boy. You didn’t write any,” he looked at a loss for words. That was fine; that was her domain.

Jo braced a curled fist on her hip and shifted her weight to turn to look at him full-on. “Of course I didn’t. In any event, I’ve often found truth to be far worse than fiction.”

Something like hurt bloomed on his face, and she had thought Amy would’ve stamped that out of him by now. She reached for his elbow only to drop her hand quickly.

“It’s a novel, Teddy. Not a diary, nor a confession.” He gave her that look of his, that questing, doubting look that only ever made her want to prove herself to him. She shook her head and wanted to laugh again. Even now, as a man, he was entirely foolish. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes but only barely. After everything, didn’t he know by now?

“And besides,” Jo continued. “Some things are mine. Some stories.” She met his eye. She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and she squeezed. Didn’t he know? “Only mine.” 


End file.
